Budapest’s cool kerts

Budapest, Hungary

Ihad arrived here during a punishing cold stretch of winter that kept me cooped up in my flat within the shadow of mighty St. Stephen’s Basilica — and in earshot of its hourly gong. When I went out, it was mostly to nearby cafes to sip double espressos and watch people shuffling by.

Spring arrived seemingly overnight. Suddenly, the city was bursting with energy — and so was I. This coincided with a friend’s visit, the perfect time to explore the city’s grittier night life.

A blue bus deposits us on a busy avenue in District VIII, a dense working-class neighborhood in downtown Pest’s southern rim. I do not know my way around. After several laps around the same block, I call for backup. Peter, a Hungarian friend, rescues us. He guides us to a plaza, around a movie theater and onto a skinny, dark street where we find a beat-up red door splashed with graffiti and stickers that leads to a narrow room.

Peter weaves expertly through the crowd and directs us into a splendid outdoor garden: pumpkin-orange and lime-green lights are suspended from the trees, dropped down over a sea of people sitting at green plastic tables. Tiki torches light the path toward the bar, a low-slung hut set in a thicket of ivy. The place pulses with raw, young energy, rebellious and cool.

We have entered a bohemian oasis, a place called West-Balkan. It is one of a handful of kerts, or “garden” cafes, that bloom each year in early spring and summer inside open-air courtyards of run-down, abandoned buildings around Budapest. Kerts are fashionable hot spots for the city’s cool, intellectual, artsy crowd, hideaways of hip, sunk deep in the wonderful rubble of old Budapest.

Finding one is part of the challenge. Most kerts are stashed away on dark and lifeless back streets, unmarked or barely marked, and constantly changing locations from one tumbledown courtyard to another. Many are in crumbling buildings on the Pest side of the city, in ramshackle neighborhoods on track for urban renewal. Owners battle to keep their doors open, often uprooting and replanting — bringing throngs of loyal patrons along with them.

With their makeshift décor (picnic tables, patio furniture, old sofas), moody lighting and short lives, kerts serve up lots of beer (local and imports), wine by the glass and sandwiches and pastries, priced at $1 to $3. They feel downright squatter-like, compared with the swanky hangouts along Budapest’s touristy drags.

At West-Balkan, I find a spot on an old bus seat in the corner, a perfect vantage point for surveying the crowd. At a table nearby is a man with graying hair and beard, his head framed by thick, square black glasses, a Hungarian version of Allen Ginsberg. He is explaining something passionately, waving his cigarette wand like a conductor, to a group at his table. They listen intently.

Kerts started as a local thing, and even then, only for locals who knew where they were. Communism’s fall in 1989 triggered a spate of development, outfitting Budapest with a bounty of new, upscale cafes and techno-thumping clubs around Pest and on river boats along the Danube River.

“These new places are lovely; but there is nothing ‘Budapest’ about them,” Peter had told me one evening as we strolled past a row of trendy restaurants along Andrassy Boulevard.

The first kert was born on the Buda side of the city in 1999. Several years later, four boys from Buda took that idea across the Danube into Pest, launching Szimpla (meaning “simple”) in a run-down courtyard in the Jewish Quarter.

Just a few blocks from upscale Andrassy, the Jewish Quarter is one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods; it thrived at the turn of the 20th century as the intellectual and cultural hub of old Pest. It’s a tangle of narrow, cobblestone streets, still dotted with kosher delis, Jewish bakeries and synagogues, and it contains a stunning cache of the city’s most historic, yet most disheveled, Art Nouveau, eclectic and Classical-style buildings.

By the summer of 2004, the local kert scene in the Jewish Quarter was booming. Where most of the kerts have since been chased away by developers and cranky neighbors, Szimpla has managed to stay put four years running — a millennium in kert years — in a rambling old building on Kazinczy Street. With a new glass enclosure in the courtyard, it stays open year-round, doubling as a cultural center, showing art house flicks in the mozi, or cinema, in the back.

Szimpla’s success has spawned a mini-franchise, including Dupla, a cafe nearby, and several other varieties with the Szimpla name. Which makes arranging to meet at Szimpla a confusing conversation that inevitably begins with the question: “Which one?”

By 2 a.m., we are kert-crazed and go in search of the mother ship: Szimpla. I spot the door on Kazinczy Street, and we duck through the entryway — a bizarre, retro-style parlor — and a spacious room. We snake through the tables, tripping over bikes and dogs and extended legs, and into the courtyard. More cool lanterns, this time small red, blue and green ones.

We find a small table next to an old kitchen sink fused into the courtyard wall. Around us is a low buzz of conversation, a swirl of voices, Hungarian and English and other languages that blend into a single, melodic international tongue. We settle in again, willing captives of kertdom, with no plans to escape any time soon.